Underwater, JB’s white shirt came away like sails filled with wind. He carried on kissing her, their mouths slipping over each other, their tongues entwined.
They surfaced in a crash, sparks of blue water exploding. Fiercely Lori pulled at his hair, wrapping her legs around him, her body wet inside and out.
With a piercing thrust he entered her. She clasped his shoulders, held him to her as his length drove deeper, his mouth on her neck and her breasts.
Throwing her head back, she met the endlessness of space.
The first tug pulled him straight under. Quick, sudden, total submersion, before he was released.
Horror surged. Enrique whipped at the water, creating a storm, and heard a high-pitched moan, thin as air, seep from his throat. He pushed forward, veering inexplicably and abruptly left, and it was only when he thrust a hand beneath the surface, groping desperately, palm open, that he realised his right leg was missing.
Another tug. No pain. This time his torso seemed to surge, light as a buoy, and a gush of viscous metal washed from his mouth.
He choked. Something bumped against him, more solid than a wall. He kicked out; thought he was kicking because his mind said he was but there was nothing to kick with. Using his arms, he propelled himself forward but he was drained and his head was full of blood and terror. Reaching down, he felt the stumps. The left was cut above his knee, the right at his hip. A trailing softness was coming from them, gummy and tough and by some warped instinct he
drew on the entrails, feeling the same satisfaction when they gave as for a stubborn knot loosening.
One last cold slug of raw night air and he was taken.
‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’
They were spent. Two lovers washed up on an abandoned beach.
‘I did,’ she gasped, recovering her breath, the water sparkling and washing around them as it had the first time. ‘There hasn’t been anyone else.’
His beautiful face right there, the groove on his lip she had remembered kissing a million times. She knew that story. He had trusted her with it.
‘No more lies,’ he whispered.
‘I’m not lying.’
‘Maximo Diaz. Your child.’
Lori reached for his hand and he let her take it, her fingers enlaced with his. ‘I tried to tell you,’ she said. ‘I swear I did. Rebecca wasn’t honest with you.’
There was a flicker of doubt in him. Pain.
‘When she said you couldn’t have children,’ Lori continued softly. ‘You can. My child is proof. Our child is proof.’
He didn’t take his gaze from hers.
‘It can’t be.’
‘It is.’ She stroked his thumb. ‘No more lies.’
There it was; she could see it. Trust. Newborn, fragile: full of fear and hope.
‘Omar’s yours.’
She pulled him close so he could feel her slow beating heart and know it was the truth.
‘He’s your son.’
‘Put the gun down, Aurora.’
‘Sit.’
‘Give it to me—’
‘Sit!’
Reuben collapsed into a chair. His head was splitting from where he’d whacked it on the deck and he couldn’t think clearly. What was happening? He needed to get his shit together and fast. This was bad. This was real fucking bad.
‘You’re going to tell me everything.’
All across the cabin, his belongings were strewn, smashed, shattered. It looked as if a bomb had gone off.
‘My real parents.’ The gun wavered in Reuben’s vision but he couldn’t tell if it was his skewed perception or her trembling aim. ‘Come on!
Who are they?
’
‘Please …’ It came out a sputter. Wretched. He had never begged before in his life.
‘You’ll get no mercy from me,’ Aurora spat. ‘Don’t even try, you pathetic old man.’
Reuben liked to push himself. It was how he’d got so far in life. He’d think of the most outrageous idea he could and then test himself,
dare
himself, to go right ahead and do it.
But he’d known at the time he had gone too far. He had taken the secret one step further. This was his knowledge to carry and his cross to bear.
The weight of it threatened to crush him.
‘Relax.’ The barrel of the gun drew in and out of focus. ‘Please—before you do something stupid. Security,’ he mumbled, ‘you’ll be taken down—’
‘Who are they?’
Aurora screamed. ‘Tell me now before I blow your fucking brains across the room and I swear to God I’ll do it and I won’t even think twice.’
Reuben gulped. ‘She was …’ His mind felt like mush. ‘She was from Finland. Poor. Desperate. Young.’
Aurora thrust the gun. ‘Where is she now? Is she still alive?’
‘I—I think so.’
‘You
think so
?’
‘I don’t know.’ He held his hands up. ‘I can find out.’
‘You can
find out
? Something’s not right here. Aren’t you meant to be sending this woman a fortune every other month? No? What, then?’ His words that night on Cacatra floated back to her. ‘So much for a
humanitarian outreach
, you evil fucking
bastard
.’
‘Aurora—’
‘You repulse me.’
It was as if Reuben were sitting next to his own shadow, and he watched his shadow get up and fight her, a silly thing, wrestle the weapon and tell her she was talking nonsense and have her committed because what sort of a kid came up with a story like that? But the real Reuben sat very still, unable to move, his head pounding and his body weak. Every day his sixty years.
‘What about him?’ she choked.
‘Who?’
‘My father.
What about him?
’
In the recesses of Reuben’s curdled mind, alarm bells rang. He grasped at the truth.
‘Tom Nash … He …’
‘What?’
‘I can’t—’
‘Say it!’
‘Tom Nash is gay,’ he croaked.
Aurora blinked.
He said it again. ‘Tom is gay. He’s gay.’
She laughed.
‘You wanted to know why?’ Reuben thrashed, desperate to throw her off the scent with the scandal he’d vowed never to expose. ‘There, that’s your reason. Tom Nash is gay and the world can never find out. That was why they did it, him and Sherilyn. They wanted a child they could call their own—a sweet-as-pie American family and you were the key. Kind of takes the sheen off when you learn he’s busy fucking asses from here to Timbuktu—’
‘I don’t believe you. It’s not possible.’
But it was. It was. Tom’s and Sherilyn’s separate bedrooms, their odd relationship, their distance … that one Christmas on the Texas ranch when Aurora had walked in on her father and Billy-Bob Hocker in the stables, half dressed, buckles undone, but she’d been too young at the time to properly remember or trust what she saw.
Calmly, single-mindedly, Aurora pressed the barrel of the gun into Reuben’s forehead.
‘If Tom isn’t my father—’ she released the safety catch ‘—then who is?’
Lance Chlomsky was swept into a moving current of people coursing to the lower deck. Reports from above claimed that Reuben van der Meyde was missing. There was wild talk of an armed assassin, a psychopath who had boarded the ship and was holding the billionaire for ransom.
Fiction. Staff inventing stories to pass the time.
Nevertheless, true to form, Lance panicked. He had always been of a fretful disposition.
Weak
, they called it. He hung back, waited till the line of frantic gossip had
passed and pushed open the door to one of the guest suites. A bad smell assaulted him. He flicked on the light.
Maximo Diaz was facedown on the bed, one arm flung over the side, a contorted expression on his bloated face. His eyes bugged open and his tongue hung loosely out the corner of a grey-green mouth.
Lance gagged on bile, staggering backwards into the corridor.
At first he thought it was someone else shouting, someone else taking control.
But no. It was him.
‘Man dead,’
he was yelling.
‘Raise the alarm!’
‘I named you Aurora,’ Reuben said. ‘The light. Because you were my first.’
No, no, no, no, no
.
‘I’d done it all. I was bored. Bored with everything. Bored, even, with what we were doing on Cacatra: the surrogacies, the babies, everything. It made money, but it wasn’t testing my ambition. I needed to find another way …’
Aurora’s body went slack. She crumpled against the wall, dripping down it like paint.
‘It felt like a fucking revolution. A shot at the next big thing.’
The gun was hanging from her grip like a dead fish.
‘Not difficult,’ he said. ‘Not after the first time.’
‘Don’t say it. Please, don’t say it—’
‘I don’t know why I picked her.’ Reuben’s tone was resigned to the inevitable. ‘I’d travelled to Finland to see her … there was a complication with the exchange and I never expected her to be so pretty. So I had an idea, a
genius idea, and I told her this was the request. That Tom and Sherilyn had asked for it.’
Aurora thought she was going to faint.
‘The Northern Lights … you were conceived beneath them. I felt like God,’ he blathered, deranged, ‘the beginning of a new order. Put on this earth for a single reason.
Procreation
.’ He licked his lips. ‘The second Adam! My children becoming part of the world … you don’t get more powerful than that.’
Reuben was trembling, cold at his fingertips and his toes. ‘Not unless you do something unprecedented … Don’t you see?’ His eyes snapped to her, insane. ‘Kids born into families right across the world, rich, influential families, who will go on to achieve great, important things that change the world and write history … Kids with
my blood running through their veins …
’
It came at her like a train down the line.
She leapt for him, clawing.
‘Don’t do it!’ he roared. ‘I’m the only family you have left!’
She scratched at his eyes, his hair, anything she could grab hold of.
‘It’s me, Aurora. I’m your father. Welcome home.’
64
A little way down the beach, a small boy was hunting for sea turtles. His father had told him they came in to lay their eggs at night, leathery things whose shells shone white in troughs of sand. He was supposed to be fast asleep by now—Miss Jensen, the housekeeper, would murder him—but it was boring waiting inside the mansion. He squinted at the yacht, hundreds of miles away, it seemed, and wished he could be there instead of here. They told him that one day it would all be his: his great inheritance. Crouching at the water’s edge, the palm of one hand cradling his chin and the other blindly raking the beach, it was hard to believe. His knees were damp from where he’d been on them, combing the smooth, still-warm sand for that final, important discovery.
His fingers curled round it instinctively at first, like a baby’s around its mother’s thumb. It felt like net, the ones he caught crabs in, but it clung to him too unhappily for that, as if by holding on it could force him, maybe, to look.
Margaret Jensen packed methodically. Something had gone wrong. What? Had Enrique been discovered? Had he been forced into confession? Had he revealed their plan? She knew he would not think twice before giving her away.
Enrique Marquez was as good as dead. And so was she.
The yacht was still out on the water, inching ever closer. It was past midnight. There wasn’t much time. She had to get them off this island.
Battling horror, Margaret dashed to Ralph’s bedroom. His door was ajar and she pushed it, flooding the room with light.
Panic hit. Her son’s bed was empty, the sheets thrown off and the window flung open. She bolted to it, searching hopelessly, and saw where he had climbed down to the beach.
It was then she heard the rupturing scream. His: unmistakably his.
Margaret raced down the stairs and into the night. Every gulp of air froze in her windpipe. Down to the sand as fast as her legs could carry her, not fast enough, never fast enough. Flying wouldn’t be fast enough.
Relief struck in a blinding flash. There he was, her boy, crouching at the shore, a tiny figure alone in the dark.
Only, he wasn’t alone.
Washed up next to him, like a slippery seal, was a woman. Her dark hair was tangled and matted. Her dress was soaked. One arm, below the elbow, was missing, torn, as though…
Margaret held Ralph tight to her chest and turned his sobbing face away. With her foot she rolled the woman, a huge perished sea-creature. The body made a slipslop sound.
When she saw who it was, she seized her son’s hand and ran.
Epilogue
The ceremony was held beneath a clear blue, sun-scorched sky. Spring was here and with it the first warmth of the year. Guests gathered under a canopy of twisting vines and pink blossoms shaken gently by the ocean breeze.
The bride was barefoot, radiant in a floor-length gown that pooled at her ankles, her hair loose and her skin glowing. Countless times she had imagined this day, what she would wear, how she would feel—and who, always who, would be waiting to take her hand.
‘Are you ready?’ Next to her, her father smiled and patted her arm.
The moment had arrived. She nodded.
Together, they made their way down the aisle. Heads turned to admire her approach. For each recognised face, she remembered one that was absent.
Maximo Diaz’s funeral took place a little less than a month after Reuben van der Meyde’s sixtieth birthday party. The autopsy had gone on longer than expected, with van der
Meyde’s people keen to maintain the man had suffered an extreme allergic reaction and the Diaz clan making waves in the press about suspected murder. It came as almost a relief when they were proven right and the killer was found. Poor Maximo could finally be laid to rest.
The funeral itself was sombre and protracted, a turnout of stooped figures hulked in black around the hole in the ground, dark yews soaring behind. It rained non-stop.
Lori Garcia lost a part of her soul that day.
Enrique Marquez
.
Murderer, terrorist, assassin. Evil, through and through.
The boy she had known a lifetime ago, the boy with the kind eyes and the gentle laugh and the ambition and drive and heart had ended up in this wild and lonely place. That boy had died long before she’d met those pitiless eyes across the yacht’s saloon.